poet
I’m excited to join Surrey Muse Writers in offering a writing workshop for young adults! We’ll be meeting from 1-3pm on May 11, 2024, at the City Centre Library in Surrey. We’ll start off with some thinking and generating, followed by a feedback session. Click here for more info.
One of my poems is out in the world! Thanks to rob mclennan for sharing it and my writing group for their insight. Read it here: https://dusie.blogspot.com/2024/03/tuesday-poem-572-kyle-mckillop-invalid.html.
by Kyle McKillop
My mom still has an envelope of her children’s blood-stained teeth.
The other day she gave me greeting cards that welcomed me
into the world decades ago. The dog grew obsessed
with the small yellow shopping bag carrying them—
she could smell Mom’s love in there. I was obsessed
with the names I didn’t know, the people who disappear
from our lives like seeds that don’t germinate.
My uncle says a lady emailed him after a DNA test
and she’s his great-great-grandfather’s brother’s descendent.
Even the grandest tree dies. I’m not the envelope
or the teeth but I feel responsible. Atomically,
this never really ends, but the end of the line
is what the reader holds in their arms the longest.
I was dangling the dog by her frisbee
and she was holding on for dear pleasure;
Kessey was then the teeth as she walked behind us.
There’s a silly little thing we do in the bedroom,
where she and I howl like ambulances
and the dog throws her body at us again and again
until she freezes to tilt her head back and aroooo.
It is the sweetest and most wrenching noise in the world.
You can’t put those little teeth back once they’re out.
The world keeps shifting under our feet.
This poem is just an envelope for Gil and Bea
or Ruth or Ernie and Marti. Love is an uncountable
noun and still carries us through, lifting with its knees.
We pant, little dogs with canines buried in flying toys,
until the next burst carries us across the field.
by Kyle McKillop
Kessey is a coral garden
asleep in bed. What we have
is soft latticework thirsty
for paint. Sometimes in morning
I record birdsong—the kiskadee,
the black-capped chickadee,
long grass shivering in the background.
It makes space in my chest for the season
of us. I’m a tulip’s showy side: petal,
pistil, stamen, pollen. The end of a line
drawn neatly from invisible roots.
What orbits us bears the future.
Little spring rain, little dancing dog
of breath. Even the trees are doing it.
We pull in the chartreuse, the lilac.
Our mouths bubble commitments
to the cause of love, of compromise.
Winded gestures but honest
enough: just listen.
by Kyle McKillop
Garlic doesn’t exactly sneak up on you,
not the way a bramble does.
That’s the wilderness factor:
an ignorance of custom, of manners.
I know you would mock that man
who spent much of the day
on the corner opposite the school
puffing and watching the world
catch fire. It’s a sweet job, though,
from the smell of it. It’s not that I wish
you were here. I mostly wish you were a puppy
already toilet trained and walked
and just settling into sleep’s trembling wars.
It’s not personal. I’d say that about anyone.
So often I’ve made sense
until I open my mouth,
which is why I recommend marriage
to wisdom, to research, to the good
humour of fallibility and second thoughts.
That’s the network below the skin of it.
The culture under the culture.
The taste loiters, eh?
The garlic scape a little smoke
rolling across the afternoon hours.
Kyle McKillop 